DON'T GET SICK WITHOUT IT

SPECIAL TO THE EXAMINER

Published 4:00 am, Monday, April 7, 1997

SUNNYVALE - Midge and Joseph Frenna wouldn't dream of leaving home without it.

Surprisingly, the plastic, wallet-sized cards carried by the San Jose couple have nothing to do with the buying power of credit. Instead, the EMCard provides the Frennas with a portable medical history that follows them to any hospital emergency room and most doctors' offices in the United States, thanks to computer technology and fax machines.

"I gives me a lot of peace of mind," said Midge Frenna, 72, who has emphysema. Her 74-year-old husband, Joseph, has cancer. "We travel up north quite a bit. . . . This way our records will follow us."

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The Frennas are among 200 or so people who have signed up since December 1996 for the cards, one of the latest examples of products involving electronic medical records.

Those who carry it complete a form outlining their medical history and pay a yearly individual $15 fee or $25 for up to four family members, with a $5 charge for each additional family member. Medical professionals can access the information by dialing an automated 24-hour phone number and punching in a 16-digit card number.

The person's medical information, which is stored in a computerized database, is then faxed to the requesting doctor or hospital. People can also add a special access code to their card number to ensure additional confidentiality.

The card is offered by the Sunnyvale-based EMCard Corp., a six-employee firm that grew out of a 1995 entrepreneurial class project developed by Stanford University business student Rama Jager, who graduated last year.

The company's chairman is Dr. Robert Burnett, a practicing emergency room physician and founder and former CEO of Lifeguard, a Milpitas-based health maintenance organization.

"It's really important for a physician to know (a patient's) medical history," said Jager, EMCard's 25-year-old president. "In emergency situations, patients aren't necessarily always able to communicate. At the same time, doctors are really under the gun in the emergency room."

The impetus for the card - which has yet to be used in a real-life emergency room situation - came to Jager after his mother was hospitalized for a stroke during the summer of 1995. She later recovered.

Jager, who was with her when the crisis occurred, filled in paramedics about her medical history, something she was unable to do at the time because she was in shock and semi-conscious.

With the EMCard, a patient's medical information can be transmitted to a waiting physician within 15 seconds and faxed over within a few minutes, said Jager.

Unlike medical bracelets which, by their size, are very limited in the amount of information that can be inscribed, the EMCard can provide doctors with information about a patient's emergency contacts, resuscitation requests, health insurance provider, allergies, medications, diseases, operations, electrocardiograms, X-rays and other medical tests.

It is designed to work anywhere in the world, provided that the emergency room or doctor's office is equipped with a fax machine and a touch-tone phone.

"It's a very big frustration for us not having medical records available," said Dr. John Longwell, an emergency room doctor who practices in Mountain View and San Jose.

Although medical records are available from a doctor's office during business hours, that's not always the case at other times when patients arrive in the emergency room, said Longwell.

And even if patients talk about their medical histories, there is no guarantee that they remember everything correctly, he said.

"The emergency room physician has to guess to a certain extent unless the patient has a good memory," said Longwell.

Medical records can also be retrieved from a person's health-insurance company. But that process can take about 15 minutes because it involves a clerk going into a huge file room, manually locating the requested records and then faxing them out, said Jager.

"In an emergency situation, if a guy is having a heart attack, that's really not that helpful," said Jager.

Other companies have developed so-called "smart cards" that can display a person's medical history at hospitals that are equipped with terminals that can read the cards electronically.

"Our product works everywhere in the U.S.," said Jager, adding that 100 percent of the country's emergency rooms and 85 percent of doctors' offices in the country have fax machines.

He said the card can help cut down on health care costs by eliminating unnecessary tests. Also, patients who visit a new doctor can have their records transferred electronically instead of having to fill out new forms.

The card has been endorsed by the California Medical Association and the Santa Clara County Medical Association.

Jager said the company pitched it to Lifeguard and another HMO but neither firm expressed interest in offering it to their subscribers.

"We're looking at a lot of different options with electronic medical records," said Tom Carter, vice president of marketing for Lifeguard, which serves 215,000 Northern California residents.

He said numerous electronic-medical records technologies are being developed and it's important to select one that is accessible to the widest range of doctors, hospitals, health insurance companies and other medical community members.

"You wouldn't want to have medical records for these members over here and those over there. The industry should have a common way of sharing medical records electronically to anyone that needs them," while assuring confidentiality, he said.&lt;